From Revelation to Here by Deborah Bell


Reveal

Deborah Bell

From Revelation to Here

 On view:

From Tuesday 12th May 2015

 At: David Krut Projects, Montebello Design Centre, Newlands, Cape Town

David Krut Projects is pleased to present a showcase of recent editions by Deborah Bell, a leading South African painter, sculptor and printmaker who has collaborated frequently with the David Krut Workshop (DKW) in Johannesburg. This series of highly accomplished etchings has been produced in collaboration with Phil Sanders, visiting New York-based master printer with our DKW team over the last two years, and includes the ethereal large-scale works titled Parsifal.

The works are rich in references from world and art history, deftly assimilated into Bell’s exploration of intuition and personal individual experience.  For instance, the work titled Reveal quotes the painting Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez (1656) of the Spanish Infanta, Margarat Theresa, a symbol of youth and innocence for Bell. Parsifal is named after Wagner’s 19th century opera about the Arthurian knight, Percival, who is depicted as a youth, not yet a grown man, symbolising innocence and possibly vulnerability. The works titled Mirror Matter I and II explore themes of death and the state beyond life, while the Annunciation series depicts a personal journey of transformation.

For Bell, art making is a spiritual practice in which the role of the artist is to ‘co-create the world’, to materialise what exists and has existed for all time, reaching for the spiritual within the material and for the material within the spiritual. She is simultaneously the maker, the material and the made; in this dissolution of the self, the artist and the art become one. This mystical relationship is fundamental to understanding Bell’s creative process and how she thinks about her work being imbued with spiritual forces which emanate from deep within her. She is also a collector of images, sketches, words and fragments from objects found in museums and galleries, continuously finding things that echo and resonate for her.

Bell considers the act of creating a work as a form of personal revelation, “to reveal and redeem some aspect of myself. As this is my reason for being an artist… Anything from a quick sketch to a large monumental sculpture would have been made with this notion of transformation in mind”.

Also on display is a selection of earlier work which, hung alongside the new editions, emphasizes a narrative that reflects Bell’s preoccupation with ‘meaning making’, personal transformation and the journey between life and death.

Parsifal-II  Premise  Mirror-Matter-I  Annunciation-I

 

On View at the Montebello Design Centre, Newlands:

Tues-Fri: 10am – 5pm

Saturday: 10am – 2pm

For more information and/or enquiries about pricing and availability of artwork, please contact Jacqueline:

[email protected] / 0216850676

 

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